Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique

Notes for this chapter begin on page 51.

Chapter One

Conversion and Convertibility in Northern Mozambique

Devaka Premawardhana

Recent scholarship on Pentecostalism in the global South gives the im-pression of a singular trajectory of inexorable growth. In this chapter,

I off er a counternarrative, not in denial of the widely reported statistical evidence but in affi rmation of the ambivalence with which individuals behind the statistics experience novelty. In so doing, I bring existential insights to bear on such themes as rupture and discontinuity, which al-ready, but inadequately, suff use studies of Pentecostal conversion. Ethno-graphic evidence from northern Mozambique suggests that the “backslid-ing into heathenism” Pentecostal leaders decry is experienced locally as a capacity, a capacity for mobility and mutability, for shifting places and altering identities. The refusal of ordinary men and women to sett le has long frustrated government administrators and religious reformers alike. It threatens to bewilder scholars as well unless we learn to think beyond the classifi catory schemes outsiders so readily deploy and insiders so as-siduously avoid.

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“There is no question that Africa is on the move.” So said United States President Barack Obama on a 2013 visit to Cape Town. He was remarking on continent-wide economic gains, gains that promised to eradicate pov-erty, curtail endemic diseases, and overcome legacies of misrule (Obama

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Conversion and Convertibility 31

2013). The Economist and Time magazine have also purveyed this message, both in recent years and both under the headline “Africa Rising.”1 Skeptics point out that Africa’s new wealth is far from fairly distributed (Dulani, Matt es, and Logan 2013) but operative for the narrative’s proponents and critics alike is the picture of a “traditional” past—marked by stability and continuity—against which a “modern” present introduces rupture and change. Although scholars (e.g., Fabian 1983) have long discredited the conceit of people outside history, versions of this picture persist, and not only in political speeches and media reports.

In this chapter I problematize the antinomy between continuity and change by exploring, on the basis of ethnographic research in northern Mozambique and with reference to existential anthropology, the fre-quently reported growth of Pentecostal Christianity.2 I show that a lot can be learned by comparing this seemingly “modern” condition of contem-porary Africa with another: the increase of population movements from rural to urban spaces. However, to appreciate what Pentecostal conver-sions share in common with urban migrations requires turning att ention from such graspable entities as churches and cities to the indeterminate individuals who often relate passingly and partially to them. Converts’ and migrants’ fl uid involvements with “modernity” refute teleological as-sumptions about its inevitability. Moreover, this fl uidity has “traditional” roots: indigenous rituals, metaphors, and histories that shape actors by inculcating not conservative dispositions, but dispositions toward change. Thus if it is true that Africa is now on the move, now rising, now rup-turing, this is largely because it has never been—nor is it likely to ever be—otherwise.

The “Modernity” of Rupture

Parallel to, if not responsible for, Africa’s newfound ascent is what is seen as Africans’ increasing mobility. Due to advances in media and transpor-tation technologies, young people in particular decreasingly tether their lives to ancestral lands and customs. “More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life” (Appadurai 1996: 6). These increased rates of migration, par-ticularly rural to urban, are frequently reported as greater in Africa than anywhere else (cf. Pott s 2012: 1–3).

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32 Devaka Premawardhana

It is not only physical mobility but imaginative mobility—across reli-gious traditions as much as geographical zones—that captures scholars’ att ention today. There may be no more dominant narrative in the academic study of religion than that of Pentecostalism’s “explosion” throughout the global South.3 Commonly cited statistics (see Johnson 2013) report as many as 600 million Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians worldwide: not bad for a movement that began a litt le over a century ago. As with ur-ban migration, in the story of Pentecostalism too Africa is often placed in the vanguard. A vast and growing literature (e.g., Meyer 2004; Adogame 2011) att ests to its seemingly inexorable spread throughout the continent.

Not only are long-distance migration and Pentecostal conversion as-sumed to be general conditions characterizing contemporary Africa, they are sometimes paired as complementary expressions of underly-ing dynamics. No work presents this complementarity more clearly than Charles Piot’s Nostalgia for the Future (2010). Piot’s central thesis is that something dramatic, epoch-defi ning in fact, has changed quotidian life in West Africa: namely, the end of the Cold War. With the withdrawal of international support for dictators and chiefs, new sovereignties emerged that have spawned, in turn, new temporalities and subjectivities. Two expressions of this transformation are “the rapid spread of charismatic Christianity” and “the desire for exile” (Piot 2010: 17). Both reorient ev-eryday life, turning att ention from untoward pasts to indeterminate fu-tures: Pentecostalism by demonizing village-based “tradition,” visa lot-teries by instilling hopes of escape to foreign lands. These two examples recall Charles Taylor’s concept of “the great disembedding” in the history of the West. This is the quintessentially modern “ability to imagine the self outside of a particular context” and it fi nds expression in two practi-cal concerns: “Should I emigrate? Should I convert to another religion/no religion?” (Taylor 2004: 55). Piot documents that Africans are increasingly asking and affi rmatively answering both questions. Africa is evidently un-dergoing its own “great disembedding,” its own entrée into modernity.

What modernity means is of course much contested, yet accompanying most uses of the category is an assumed break with what came before, i.e., the premodern or the traditional (cf. Puett 2006).4 Among numerous misgivings Harri Englund and James Leach (2000) express toward the “meta-narratives of modernity” driving contemporary anthropology, one is precisely their ex-aggerated emphasis on rupture. Piot exemplifi es this. Although not without gesturing toward continuities across periods, he eventually and unequivo-cally “wager[s] on rupture,” declaring himself “committ ed to the idea that a threshold has been crossed,” that “a seismic shift” and “a watershed greater than any in recent memory” have taken place (Piot 2010: 12–14). Likewise,

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for Arjun Appadurai, with “modernity at large”—with the widespread vi-ability of disembedding—“the world in which we now live . . . involve[s] a general break with all sorts of pasts” (1996: 3).

Those words are echoed in the title of Birgit Meyer’s infl uential essay, “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Postcolonial Moder-nity in Ghanaian Pentecostal Discourse” (1998). In the case Meyer describes, to break with one’s past means to sever ties with kin and to cease ancestral ritual practices. The global reach of this Pentecostal injunction has gener-ated a decade’s worth of ethnographic att ention to and anthropological the-orizing about Christianity. The most sensitive studies (Meyer 1999; Robbins 2004) demonstrate that this break with the past plays out paradoxically: the very process of demonizing and expelling ancestral deities also affi rms their reality, presence, and power. Yet Pentecostalism’s discourse of disjunc-ture and ritualization of rupture have led anthropologists of Christianity to retheorize how people relate the new to the old, and to do so program-matically, in terms that help legitimize their new anthropological subfi eld (Robbins 2003; 2007; Cannell 2006). Joel Robbins has forcefully argued that what blinds anthropology to the Pentecostal project of discontinuity is the discipline’s “continuity bias,” its view that “culture comes from yesterday, is reproduced today, and shapes tomorrow” (2007: 10). This bias fi nds ex-pression in the tropes of syncretism, hybridization, and domestication, all of which suggest the new being received necessarily in terms of the old. Pentecostalism and the study of it demand something diff erent. Rather than imposing anthropology’s continuity bias on Pentecostals, Robbins uses “Christian models of time” (2007: 10)—evident in apocalyptic eschatologies and exorcism rituals—to dismantle the view that every act merely instanti-ates an a priori cultural framework. Piot, who draws heavily on Robbins, likewise concludes his book with a trenchant challenge to anthropology’s fetishizing of cultural pasts (2010: 169–170).

Although not couching these critiques in the language of existentialism, an affi nity suggests itself when Robbins faults anthropology’s overly de-terminative concept of culture for leaving “no explicit room . . . for change and certainly not for radical change” (2007: 10). Change and futurity are key existential concerns. Friedrich Nietz sche’s (1968: 479–481) elevation of becoming over being and Martin Heidegger’s (1962: 305) view of the existing human as a “Being towards a possibility” express what Michael Jackson and Albert Piett e, in their introduction to this volume, call “the surprising malleability and multiplicity of the human subject.” Existential anthropologists would therefore not disagree with the claim made within the anthropology of Christianity that received models of cultural continu-ity woefully neglect novelty and surprise.

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In her own study of Pentecostalism, Ruth Marshall off ers yet another ar-ticulation of this critique (2009: 5–6). Diff erently from others, however, she does invoke existentialism, describing Pentecostalism’s bridge-burning, aspirational qualities in terms of Hannah Arendt’s principle of natality (Marshall 2009: 3). For Arendt, the miracle of birth expresses the capac-ity of all human action to initiate new beginnings, to release the future from bondage to the past (1971: 247). The evidence Marshall draws from Pentecostals in Lagos empirically grounds this existential point. Besides validating actors’ own self-designation as “born-again” Christians, her work (like that of other rupture theorists explored here) off ers a valuable critique of the social scientifi c view that people are bound and ultimately reducible to their formative contexts.

Beyond Pentecostal Explosion

Guided by the discontinuity turn in contemporary anthropology, I arrived in Mozambique in 2011 to study how urban migration and Pentecostal conversion correlate in one particular locale. I landed in Lichinga, the fast-growing capital of the northern province of Niassa. There, as many as fi fteen branches of the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) had opened in the previous ten years: evidence, indeed, of Pentecostalism’s “explosion” throughout the global South. Att ending these churches, I regularly heard preachers enjoin worshippers to aban-don the complex of persons subsumed under the moniker “tradition”: ancestral spirits, ritual healers, and diviners. These must be renounced in favor of the true trinity: God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit—evidence, here, of the Pentecostal project of discontinuity.

It did not take long, however, before each of my initial observations demanded revision. In the fi rst place, Pentecostalism’s growth was far from “explosive.” The most graphic illustration of this was writt en on the cracked, whitewashed wall of a two-story building across from Lichinga’s municipal prison. During the time of my fi eldwork, the building served as a storage and operations facility for a local non-governmental organiza-tion. A banner displaying the organization’s Portuguese acronym ADPP (Ajuda de Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo) occupied the top right cor-ner of the exterior wall. However, in faded yellow lett ers that the banner only partially covered appeared the faintly visible words, “Jesus Cristo é o Senhor” (Jesus Christ is the Lord): the slogan affi xed to UCKG buildings throughout the world. The narrative of Pentecostalism’s boom is com-monly expressed in terms of former cinemas, factories, and warehouses

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turned into churches. Here I encountered the reverse. In talking with UCKG pastors throughout the city, I learned further that this was not an aberration. Of the fi fteen UCKG branches that had opened in Lichinga, as many as three had folded; others had moved into smaller buildings. Yes, churches were booming, but here, at least, some were also busting. It is not that Pentecostalism entirely lacked appeal. Indeed, as many pastors explained to me, every time a new congregation opened, masses of people would fl ood in. But within a few months, most would leave. Curiously, among those who left, many would appear again, but too irregularly to be counted by pastors as among the faithful.5

These observations may surprise those familiar with the literature on religion in contemporary Africa; they surprised me when the literature was all I had to go on. There is good reason for that. It has to do with dis-tortions arising out of the way research decisions are made. Most scholars who set out to study Pentecostalism gravitate, understandably, to those places where Pentecostalism is vibrant, where people called (or whom we call) “Pentecostals” are most easily identifi able and readily researchable. This is one of a few occupational hazards that come with identifying one-self as an anthropologist of Christianity or as a scholar of Pentecostalism.6 Consider the introduction to a volume of studies conducted under the auspices of the well-funded Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initia-tive. Project director Donald Miller acknowledges that “statistics are diffi -cult to assess because of the somewhat nebulous character of the renewal-ist movement” (2013: 9). He nevertheless goes on to cite a plethora of statistics backed up by two appendices, all of which corroborate the book publisher’s claim that “Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world.” Elsewhere in his introduction, Miller comments on “the privilege of overseeing a large research initiative on global Pente-costalism, which has allowed me to travel to places where one might not expect to see Pentecostal churches, such as Indonesia and Russia” (2013: 4). One wonders, however, whether he set out to visit places where, it happens, “one might not expect to see Pentecostal churches,” or set out to visit Pentecostal churches that he knew he would see, and determined (particular parts of) particular countries to travel to on that basis.

The burgeoning anthropology of Christianity subfi eld likewise bolsters its legitimacy by screening for evidence, and championing the narrative, of Pentecostalism’s “explosion.” In one review essay the claim is made early on that the recent overcoming of anthropology’s historical neglect of Christian-ity owes to “a tremendous expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Oceania.” There one fi nds in particular “Pentecostal and Charis-matic groups whose members practice their faith in ways that make their

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commitments hard to ignore” (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1141). My research asks whether we ought not att end to places where Pentecostal-ism is not tremendously expanding, where the presence and practices of Pentecostals are in fact marginal to such popular Euro-American academic concerns as nationalism, neoliberalism, mass media, and the “resurgence of religion” in public life. Even in places where Pentecostals are relatively easy to ignore, would there not be a story worth telling, a story in part about Pentecostalism itself? Such questions are only recently being asked by an-thropologists of Christianity (Robbins 2013), yet the fact remains that if one wanted to study Pentecostalism in Mozambique, one would not likely land in Lichinga. In my fi rst weeks of fi eldwork I wondered, indeed agonized over, whether I made a wrong choice of fi eld site. I fi nally decided that there is no good reason this should be the case, for the ethnographic method, as I understood it, entails a commitment to people fi rst and to abstractions like Christianity only insofar as they matt er to those people.

Circular Migrations and Reversible Conversions

While noting Pentecostalism’s uneven growth in the city of Lichinga, I also recorded stories of ambivalence toward the city itself. A friend named Gildon7 told me that he needed a decent job to have money but, because examiners for the few available positions demanded bribes, he needed money to get a job. He turned to hawking tomatoes for scant pay in a crowded market, but later came to decide he would rather tend his own crops by returning to his machamba (smallholder farm) in his home dis-trict. Such a decision to reverse course is, against conventional wisdom, not uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa (Englund 2002; Pott s 2010). Its com-monality refutes what James Ferguson aptly calls the “myth of permanent urbanization” (1999: 41–43). I decided to track people like Gildon back to their rural homes, and ended up in the Makhuwa belt of southern Ni-assa province. The particular district to which I moved can require up to fi ve hours of motor vehicle travel from Lichinga (many more during the rainy season when roads turn to mud). It could be considered a frontier society (Kopytoff 1987) given its marginality to centers of economic and political power. Its population density falls below the average for Niassa province, which is already distinguished as, by far, Mozambique’s most sparsely populated region.8 Although seemingly remote, the region has long been visited by global religions. At the time of my fi eldwork, Muslim and Christian (Roman Catholic) adherents were present in roughly equal numbers, with nearly everyone also engaging in ancestral observances.

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In the mid-1990s, Pentecostalism arrived in this district. Of the denomi-nations present there in 2012, all but one confi ned their work to the district capital where att endees were almost entirely merchants and government workers from elsewhere in Mozambique. Only the Assemblies of God, African (hereafter AOGA), maintained satellite communities in the outly-ing villages.9 These were sparsely and sporadically att ended, one counting two married couples as its members, the largest—in a 700-person village called Kaveya—att racting never more than a dozen worshippers on the Sundays I visited. The Pentecostal churches in this region presented not only further counterevidence to the “Pentecostal explosion” narrative; my observations in them (and out of them) also clarifi ed the limits of con-temporary anthropology’s enchantment with discontinuity. These limits became apparent through sustained participation in the everyday lives of ordinary individuals, individuals such as the young man, Abílio, who held the title of secretary at Kaveya’s AOGA congregation.

Not long before my wife and I took up residence in Kaveya village, Abílio began a project, backed by a government loan, to install and oper-ate a diesel-powered grinding mill. This was a tremendous technologi-cal import for a part of the world still lacking electricity, running water, and cell phone coverage. Kaveya already had a grinding mill, but Abílio identifi ed a neighboring village ten kilometers away still without one. He moved his family and his project there. Sorghum or maize fl our being the basis of chima, the pasty porridge that is a dietary staple throughout southeastern Africa, villagers eagerly welcomed the mechanized mills. Abílio counted on this fact to rise above the subsistence-level existence of nearly everyone he has ever known. Soon after installing the mill, Abílio summoned members of his Pentecostal church, back in Kaveya village, to inaugurate it. On an agreed upon day, the church members walked to Abílio’s new home, and with the same vigor with which they prayed and sang on Sunday mornings, they blessed the grinding mill, imploring Jesus Christ to keep away all evil spirits who would love to see Abílio’s project fail.

Four days later, it failed. The mill liner came undone and Abílio’s en-terprise for grinding grain ground to a halt. The following day, the village chief showed up at Abílio’s compound to inform him that the recently deceased chief, named Mutikiniki, had been displeased. He was unhappy that Abílio arrived on his land and initiated a new project without fi rst making the requisite sacrifi ces. Without delay, and without trying to con-ceal it from his fellow Pentecostals, Abílio gathered a diff erent group to reinaugurate the grinding mill. At the mutholo-tree shrine in the forest be-hind his new home, Abílio and local ritual specialists bent low and rubbed

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sorghum fl our between their hands, chanting their petitions to Mutikiniki. They requested from him restoration for the mill, clients for Abílio, and prosperity for the village.

News of this traveled fast, and eventually got to Pastor Simões, the district-level leader of the AOGA and offi ciating pastor at the church’s main congregation in the district capital. He told me he was not terribly surprised, though still upset. After all, one of Abílio’s responsibilities as secretary was to report to Pastor Simões when church members stray from the path. Here Abílio was the one straying. The next Sunday, Pastor Simões borrowed the motorcycle of a well-off congregant and journeyed the forty-fi ve kilometers to Kaveya village. After leading the morning service, he called on the adult members to stay into the afternoon for a meeting. There Pastor Simões issued Abílio a reprimand (repreensão), an offi cial church punishment that stripped Abílio of his leadership position and barred him from participating in church services. He was instructed to continue att ending services but to do so without preaching, dancing, or singing, a severe punishment in a church of such intense and participatory worship (Maxwell 2006: 197–200).

For the next many months, Abílio continued regularly att ending church services back in Kaveya, walking the twenty-kilometer round trip with his wife and their small child despite being still under reprimand. During that time, I regularly asked Abílio whether he regrets having broken his church’s prohibition against ancestral sacrifi ce. Noting that the grinding mill is now up and running—possibly because of Mutikiniki summoned from the invisible realm, possibly because of the repairman summoned from town—Abílio answered no. He felt that he needed properly to pro-pitiate the “owners of the land” (donos da terra) for his project to take off . Apparently the upward mobility to which he aspired required a certain degree of lateral mobility.10 He therefore accepted without protest his punishment, conveying to me litt le sense of wrongdoing, no anguish over what he had done. He seemed almost surprised by my regular inquiries into his inner state. “Oh, Papá,” he would say with a wide smile. “This is nothing.” I was surprised by his nonchalance, a clear contrast with the moral anguish Robbins (2004) fi nds his Melanesian informants to experi-ence in their Pentecostal projects of rupture.

Yet Abílio’s response did recall something else: the equanimity of peo-ple I met throughout southern Niassa who had ventured out to urban centers—Lichinga, Cuamba, Nampula—only to return to their macham-bas. Unlike the Zambian labor migrants in Ferguson’s study who went to mine towns with “expectations of modernity,” the largely uneducated (in the formal sense) men and women of southern Niassa were not brought

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up on romantic tales of life in the city or of the professional achievements they could expect after years of schooling. The absence of modernist ide-ologies shaped the way people like Gildon approached their return to the countryside when life in the city proved unviable: without the sense of be-trayal, humiliation, and shatt ered hopes that Ferguson (1999: 247) notes in his Zambian study. Gildon, in the context of migration, oscillated between the “modern” and the “traditional” as seamlessly as Abílio, in the context of conversion, seemed to.

Against the Singularity of Selfhood

How might anthropology bett er account for such fi ssures in the narrative of unidirectional ruptures and irreversible shifts? It turns out that Piot, despite purveying this type of narrative in his most recent work, provides therein an answer. Extending his thesis that both Pentecostal religiosity and long-distance migration independently bespeak discontinuity, Piot notes that the two phenomena even reinforce one another: “Not surpris-ingly, perhaps, prayer is routinely called on to enhance peoples’ [sic] chances in the [visa] lott ery. Entire Lomé congregations have even been known to engage in prayer . . . so that members will get visas.” Yet, Piot adds, “The lott ery fuels not only church att endance but also visits to spirit shrines. One selectee I know hedged his bets and did both, stepping up church att endance while also returning to the village to consult a diviner” (2010: 91). An important methodological shift has taken place from one passage to the next. It is a shift in focus: from ethnography to biography, from the general to the particular, from “entire Lomé congregations” to “one selectee.” Although his book centers on wide-scale post–Cold War aspirations to break with such things as villages and spirit shrines, Piot in this brief but telling anecdote reveals what his theoretical model would disqualify: the circular and situational character of both migration and conversion.11

A fl aw in much scholarly writing is its tendency to eclipse such varia-tions in lived experience with overgeneralized explanatory theories, con-ceptual schemes, and metanarratives. A limitation of cultural anthropol-ogy specifi cally is its tendency to reduce human behavior, thought, and action to the cultural forces that shape them and the cultural representa-tions that express them. The critique of culturalism—the presumed deter-minativeness and boundedness of “culture”—was powerfully made de-cades ago (see, e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Yet one need look no further than the thriving anthropology of Christianity for

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evidence that the problem persists. Robbins (2007) contrasts this subfi eld with the historical anthropology of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1991; 1997). By focusing on the imbrications of Christianity and colonial capitalism in the South African missionary encounter, the Comaroff s fail to consider the content of Christianity in this particular sett ing, its signifi -cance “as a system of meanings with a logic of its own” (Robbins 2007: 7; see also Cannell 2006: 11–12). Yet it is precisely Robbins’s systematic, logo-centric conception of culture that anthropologists have done well to move beyond. Against “anthropologists today [who] commonly assert that all cultures are made up of bits and pieces of varied origin,” Robbins in-sists on identifying that which uniquely characterizes Pentecostal culture (2010: 161–162). He ultimately sett les on a negative defi nition—“a culture ‘against culture’” (159, 161) in the sense that Pentecostalism is predicated on rupture with the past—but insists nonetheless that it is meaningfully spoken of as a whole. In his rejoinder, John Comaroff (2010: 529) argues that by “treat[ing] the faith primarily as culture,” Robbins revives an ahis-torical and immaterial notion of culture that is bett er off dead. I could not agree more with Comaroff in this critique (see also Englund 2007: 482; Hann 2007), though I do not endorse the alternative Comaroff and Coma-roff off er, one that hypostatizes abstract and anonymous forces of another type, e.g., neoliberalism, commodifi cation, and modernity (Englund and Leach 2000: 228–229).

Against all forms of reduction and abstraction, existential anthropol-ogy intervenes by reinserting the individual and refusing to infer lived ex-perience from identities and epochs. Comaroff (2010: 528) would call this a “fetishism of the local” and a failure to deal with theory. Yet a phenom-enological turn to lived experience need not imply a denial of either po-litical economy or culture. It is simply a refusal to see the “macro-cosmic forces and determinations in the world” (Comaroff 2010: 528) as so force-fully determinative that people have nothing to do but acquiesce to them. Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1991) call for “writing against culture” with “ethnog-raphies of the particular” and Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s (1962: 119–153) focus on “religious persons” prior to “religious systems” recognize that the discursive apparatuses of the human sciences can never succeed in erasing humans.

Along with identifying and characterizing “Christian culture,” a par-allel research priority in the anthropology of Christianity has been that of specifying what it means for such people as Abílio to be a “Christian self.” Anthropologists and social theorists alike have long noted the role of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, in individualizing and interior-izing subjectivity (Cannell 2006: 14–22). Among those for whom selfh ood

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is defi ned relationally, conversion to Christianity entails conversion not only to a religion but to modern notions of autonomous personhood (van der Veer 1996: 9; Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1147; Keane 2007). An important challenge to existential anthropology arises from this point: if Christianity is what transmits the ideology of individualism, it may be misguided, ethnocentric even, to presume individuality in the people we study.12 Inquiry can legitimately att end to processes of individualization, but not to individuals.

Yet just as surely as models of unidirectional conversion and migration oversimplify, so too do trajectories of individualization and the typology they assume. Against claims anthropologists once made about the mysti-cal participations of “primitive” people, Godfrey Lienhardt highlights the eccentricities, slips of tongue, and clever calculations at the core of “tra-ditional” African folktales. Without foreclosing relationality, these reveal an “African concern, also, on occasion, with individuals as individuals” (Lienhardt 1985: 143). Conversely, against claims that Pentecostals are au-tonomous individuals, numerous recent studies show that, postconver-sion, forms of sociality get newly produced (Coleman 2006; Engelke 2010; Haynes 2012) while others persist from the past (Lindhardt 2010; Daswani 2011). To honor such ambiguities, Simon Coleman recommends that we replace the language of trajectory (from relational to individual selves) with that of negotiation since “the spiritual, moral, and ethical movements involved in such negotiation are not one way and certainly do not seem inevitable” (2011: 244). Rather than reducing subjectivity to one relatively stable modality or another, determined by such “cultures” as African or Pentecostal, existential anthropology similarly calls att ention to the vari-ety of ways of being—egocentric and sociocentric—that remain available and negotiable whatever the cultural context (Jackson 2012).

By virtue of his leadership role in the church sett ing where anthropolo-gists of Christianity are wont to fi nd him, Abílio would be classifi ed in scholarly accounts as “a Pentecostal,” one among the 600 million consti-tuting Pentecostalism’s worldwide “explosion.” But what does it mean for someone so eclectic in his religious practices to “be” Pentecostal? Can such labels do justice to individuals like Abílio and the unnamed visa aspirant in Piot’s study? Is the behavior of either man emblematic of Pentecostal selfh ood or of African selfh ood, entirely and at all times autonomous or entirely and at all times relational? Though there may be heuristic value in speaking of a Christian, or modern, ideology of the self, care must be taken not to ontologize ideologies. To the extent they apply, they are best seen as applying episodically, in response to the changing circumstance of a person’s life. So many of those whom I came to know over the course

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of my fi eldwork limited their actions to neither a “Pentecostal” nor “tra-ditional” frame, neither an urban nor rural one, neither an individual nor a relational one. Rather, they experimented with and oscillated between the various options available to them. If there is any essence to this kind of selfh ood it would be its irreducible multiplicity, its intrinsic mobility. Existentialists have captured this paradox with terms such as the “jour-neying self” (Natanson 1970) and the “homo viator” (Marcel 1952).

Those among whom I lived might more playfully deploy the metaphor of the polygamous man. He must provide for the well-being of each of his wives and all of their children, a less than enviable role in a society so marked by scarcity. Given matrilocal residence patt erns, discharging this responsibility requires that he spend much of his time walking, usually alone and sometimes all day, between the widely dispersed homesteads of his wives. Once, while returning to the district capital after an intensive week in the villages, I happened to cross paths with an acquaintance, a man I knew to have multiple wives. After exchanging greetings I asked whether he was also heading home. He replied with a hearty laugh. “The polygamous man has no home. He lives on the road!”

The Art of Not Being Settled

In both Lichinga and the rural districts, I met numerous migrants and con-verts engaging the paradigmatic “disembeddings” of modernity without regard for the unilinear teleologies associated with them. There is, besides this, another highly revealing commonality that connects migration and conversion. For in the Makhuwa language13 as spoken throughout south-ern Niassa province, the words are virtually interchangeable. One would not know this relying only upon offi cial Makhuwa-Portuguese dictionar-ies that render conversão as opitikuxa murima, literally “change of heart” (e.g., Filippi and Frizzi 2005: 1034).14 Whenever villagers talked with me about changing religious affi liations or practices, they never used that expression. Much more common was the relatively mundane ohiya ett ini ekina, orowa ett ini ekina (literally, “leave one religion, go to another”): ohiya (“to leave”) and orowa (“to go”) being ways of designating all geographic dislocations. Conversion, it turns out, is expressed spatially and bodily; it is a migratory movement, as much physical as spiritual. This accords with one ancient Greek word for conversion, epistrophe, which connotes turning or returning, in contrast with another, metanoia, which suggests something more like rebirth and the transformation of interior att itudes (Hadot 1968).

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The spatiality of change is actually a long-standing theme in Makhuwa thought and experience. Consider the myth of Namuli (Macaire 1996: 19–24; Lerma Martinez 2009: 40–43). Mount Namuli, the second tallest of Mozambique, is where all Makhuwa people trace their origins. Their forebears resided atop the mountain until disputes arose that resulted in diff erent groups descending and spreading to surrounding regions. Makhuwa cosmogony, therefore, is a story of migration. Importantly, however, upon death one’s spirit returns to and reascends the mountain. As commonly recited in songs and proverbs: “From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return.”

Patt erns of egress and regress permeate biographical narratives as well. When I asked Abílio to tell me about the times he has migrated in his life, he laughed and said, “I was born on the move.” I took this as a metaphor for the many times he has moved, including his latest relocation to a vil-lage in need of a grinding mill. But he meant it literally. He was refer-ring to events that have marked the collective memory of the community: their experience as refugees, fl ushed from their villages by rebel fi ghters who, during Mozambique’s civil war (1976–1992), raided, pillaged, raped, and murdered in rural areas throughout the country (Vines 1991). This is, sadly, just one of the more recent historical circumstances that had many Mozambican peasants on the run (Lubkemann 2008). One could recount numerous state-making projects from precolonial and colonial (Isaacman 1996) to postcolonial times (Bowen 2000; Isaacman and Isaacman 2013): projects to enslave villagers, monitor them, control them, tax them, and conscript them. At least in the Makhuwa belt of Niassa province (Funada-Classen 2012), this long history of outsiders’ att empts at control has met less military resistance than simple fl ight, one among other “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985).15

In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott (2009) describes at great length this fugitive capacity among upland peasants of southeast Asia. He documents the array of techniques they and other self-governing people de-ployed against the eff orts of states to consolidate them and confi scate their resources: living at a distance from the state center; practicing rotational, rather than fi xed-fi eld, agriculture; maintaining pliable social structures prone to fi ssure and reconstitution. All of these served as strategies of eva-sion, means of remaining illegible to state power, and they almost perfectly apply to the Makhuwa of Niassa province. They are also an itinerant people who have cultivated practices that facilitate fl ight in response to a long and continuing history of foreign invaders and their unwanted wars.

It should come as no surprise, then, that it is deep into the bush of this heavily forested region where most families construct their mud-plaster

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huts, in relative isolation from each other and in extreme isolation from the government’s expanding infrastructure. That infrastructure consists mainly of rugged motor roads connecting the district capital to the coun-tryside. Because these roads symbolize the rapidity of development that the contemporary, neoliberal moment prizes, the district government is currently engaged in a campaign to resett le villagers alongside them. Not coincidentally, it is on those roads that Pentecostal churches, even in rural outposts, have appeared.

The people among whom I worked are not averse to these contem-porary changes. Whether from the rural district to the provincial capi-tal, or from the forest to the road, many do in fact migrate; and, among those who do, many do in fact convert. However, to the consternation of government agents and Pentecostal evangelists alike, few do either with any sense of permanence. As in the example of Abílio, many who enter the churches continue sacrifi cing to the spirits; likewise, many who relocate to the main road continue cultivating far from it. Yes, people readily embrace opportunities for rupture, change, and new beginnings; but they do so on their own terms. In the case of the rural resett lement campaign, this is not by replacing their homes in the forest with new ones by the road, but by maintaining two distinct residences, even if many kilometers apart, and circulating between them: rainy seasons far from the road, dry seasons (after harvest) alongside it. This multiplicity of residences off ers access to the best of both worlds: the main benefi ts of the road being schools, water pumps, and vehicular transport to the dis-trict hospital; the main benefi t of the bush being abundant, fertile land that makes it possible, simply, to eat.

Maintaining one home far from the road also off ers a site of refuge in case this resett lement campaign ends up as prior ones did. It is well re-membered that after the Portuguese colonial government forced people to move to the roadside, war soon followed. Although that war resulted in Mozambique’s birth as a nation, few in rural Niassa reported feeling their lives changed for the bett er. Following independence, the ruling govern-ment, adopting a program of socialist modernization, enforced a policy of compulsory villagization (Bowen 2000: 45–61). Soon after relocating to these communal villages, war again followed. This time it was Mozam-bique’s civil war, a much diff erent war but with a very similar feel for local peasants. It had nothing to do with them except for forcing them to live for over a decade as exiles: continually fl eeing from rebel fi ghters, never able, and never foolish enough, to put down roots.

It is therefore not surprising that, today, most of those constructing sec-ond homes alongside the roads do so cautiously. They not only refuse to

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resett le permanently, they also seem litt le interested in building what gov-ernment agents and development workers call casas amelhoradas (literally, “improved homes”): modern constructions using sturdy materials like baked bricks and corrugated zinc. Rather, for many, simple mud, bamboo, and thatch constructions known as pau a pique (Macaire 1996: 362–365) continue to serve just fi ne. Of course, such structures easily succumb to the rains, and must be abandoned or refurbished every fi ve years. But that may just be the point. Unlike “modern homes,” mud huts are easy to construct; and because the sunk costs of building them are negligible, they are not only quickly built, they are painlessly abandoned: architecture for the fl eet-footed.

Although not nomadic pastoralists like other East African populations, the frequency of movement among many I came to know was striking. They seemed to get up and leave with the greatest of ease, most com-monly in the case of marriage (and divorce), the depletion of soil fertility, a dispute with a chief, or a sorcery att ack. There is a tendency to see those who live so itinerantly the same way we see hunters and gatherers: primi-tives of a bygone era. However, as Scott (2009: 327) maintains, people who choose nomadism are not a window into how “we” used to be before ad-vancing up the civilizational ladder to agrarian states and then city-states. Rather, they are people who opt for the edges of “civilization” because they know that to be civilized means to be sett led, to be sett led means to be governed, and to be governed means to lack autonomy, freedom, and (what might be the same thing) mobility.

Dispositions toward Discontinuity

How does all this help us understand the contemporary state of Pente-costalism in northern Mozambique? I frequently asked pastors why it is so hard to retain members, why people like Abílio seem to enter and leave churches with such ease. “The problem,” they would almost invari-ably reply, “is that people here are too rooted [enraizado] in tradition.” It is a signifi cant claim because if there is one thing that any newcomer to a village learns immediately, it is the importance of roots. Literally. Roots are essential components of the medicines prepared by healers, and root crops—cassava or manioc, especially—are the most common gifts with which strangers are sent off at the end of a visit. They are also a prime nu-tritional source for people who prize their mobility. Scott (2009: 195–196) describes manioc, yams, and potatoes as the ultimate “escape” crops. Un-like grains, they grow underground, invisible to the eyes of tax collectors;

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and they can remain safely there for up to two years, to be dug up piece-meal as needed. They are illegible to state powers, just as the people who grow them aspire to be.

It was in conversation with Paulino, one of my research assistants, that I learned these features of roots. Sensing that Paulino had more to say, I pressed the discussion in a direction I hoped would shed light on the pas-tors’ complaints.

“But what is it that roots us?” I asked. “Do we need to be rooted the way trees and plants do?”

“Of course,” he replied without pause, “which is why we also have roots!”

He grabbed his forearm and I looked at him quizzically.“Here,” he said, pointing to his veins. “These are our roots.”In the Makhuwa dialects of Niassa province, while there is a word for veins

(misempha), these are described as performing the function of roots (mikakari). Of course, in the way we tend to speak of roots, veins are decidedly not roots: my veins run through my body, but they do not anchor it to the ground. Yet in another respect, recognized in the Makhuwa metaphor, our veins do ex-actly what the roots of a plant do. They are the channels through which fl ow the sources of our vitality: lifeblood for us, soil nutrients for plants.

Continuing his lesson, Paulino said, “Our veins/roots [mikakari sahu] make our blood to circulate.”

Then, dramatically bounding to his feet: “And that makes us to circulate!”

My observation about the new churches in northern Mozambique is not that people do not att end, but that they selectively att end. They move into the new churches, but they also move out, and when situations change and new needs arise they move back in. If they do this because they are too rooted in tradition, it is not in the pastors’ sense of roots that fi x, but in Paulino’s sense of roots that mobilize.

Further suggested by this image is that being committ ed is not opposed to being fl uid. Roots are not opposed to routes; roots are routes. The passing and partial patt ern of religious participation I observed is often maligned, seen as a kind of backwardness not unlike foraging. It is disparaged as superfi cial, opportunistic, and inauthentic. A closer look, however, reveals that some people succeed in living eclectically without ceasing to live pas-sionately. Refusing to equate fi delity with exclusivity, they engage with what Janet McIntosh (2009), in her study of Islam among the Giriama, calls polyontologism. Distinct from the overarching coherence presumed in the category of syncretism, polyontologism holds open pluralism and

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fl uidity without discarding the sense of distinct, compartmentalized es-sences: “Religious plurality is not about reconciling Islam and Giriama Traditionalism into a new, systemic whole, but about drawing on both religions while continuing to mark them as distinct. More than one reli-gion may be used, but they are juxtaposed rather than blended” (McIn-tosh 2009: 188). The multiplicity of states, identities, or positionalities one might assume in this model is not a simultaneous multiplicity but a serial one, akin to what computer scientists call toggling or multitasking, what linguists call code switching, and what psychologists call cognitive shifts. Entailed is an ability to fl uctuate not only between multiple registers, but between periods of fl ux and periods of stasis (James 1950: 243).

The presence of fi xity amidst movement, of roots amidst routes, tells us that credit can in fact be given to the anthropology of Christianity’s rupture theory of conversion. As we have already seen, Pentecostal reli-giosity, with its Manichean worldview, is not well captured by anthropo-logical models of hybridization and localization. It does, in fact, demand discontinuous conversion.16 Among the Makhuwa, however, none of this is especially new. Various spheres of “traditional” life presume disparate domains and clear borders between them. A great deal of ritual eff ort is expended on establishing a plethora of distinctions: between men and women, the uninitiated and the initiated, the living and the dead, the vil-lage and the bush. Of course, these borders are regularly traversed. At initiation rituals, women mimic men, and men act like boys. At healing and sacrifi cial rituals, the dead join the living, and the living the dead. Men hunt for meat, women gather fi rewood, healers search for medicinal roots, and diviners seek out wisdom by regularly venturing out to and back from the bush. These transgressions demonstrate not the absence of borders but their permeability, indeed the way in which well-being is predicated on an interplay between closure and openness, containment and the refusal to be contained.

Pentecostalism plays on this double sense of borders. Preachers warn adherents to stay within the lines, not to “backslide into heathenism.” Yet the ritual practices contradict the rhetoric. For while there is a discursive divide between Pentecostalism and everything outside of it, the experien-tial and embodied dynamics of Charismatic Christianity (Csordas 2012) reinforce more than they contravene the fundamental Makhuwa experi-ence of the fl uctuating self, a self whose well-being depends on transfor-mations, and whose transformations often entail transportations. What is notable about the Makhuwa context is not so much the epistemological divide between Pentecostalism on the one hand and indigenous prac-tices and beliefs on the other. What matt ers is that, despite the distinct

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domains, people move bidirectionally between them, oscillating as they always have with alacrity, nimbleness, and ease.

“Why do people convert?” This, the most common of analytical con-cerns, may not be the best question we could be asking. For it assumes that conversion is an anomaly. We generally conceive of religious conversion as the outcome of some calamity, whether personal or social.17 What my research suggests is that what appears to outsiders as momentous shifts may be experienced by insiders as unexceptional. As Edmund Leach wrote about the eff ects of merging polities on Kachin self-perception: “It is only the external observer who tends to suppose that [such] shifts . . . must be of shatt ering signifi cance” (1954: 287). Ascribing shatt ering signifi cance to religious change reveals at least as much about us as it does about those we work with. It bespeaks a bourgeois tendency to locate well-being in se-cure and stable identities, in tethering ourselves to something fi rm: brick homes, state centers, religious cultures. Yet might there be other ways to see things? Is it possible that there are people with a higher tolerance for “insecurity” and vulnerability, people for whom movement across bor-ders, engagement with alterity, and exposure to the new are, despite their dangers, preconditions for well-being?

The normalizing of stasis over fl ux fi ts the substantive view of reality that we inherit from Plato’s directive to fi x our gazes on the eternal and the immutable. Since then, the Western intellectual tradition has had a hard time dealing with the phenomenon of change. One of its more recent models, from the philosophy of science, posits the existence of two du-rable paradigms within each of which “normal science” occurs; the shift from one to another is occasioned by “revolutionary science” (Kuhn 1962). What my project off ers is the possibility of paradigms that collapse the distinction between the ordinary and revolutionary, where movements within paradigms are continuous with movements between them. These would be frameworks that facilitate their own piecemeal and experimen-tal revision, that render transformations banal extensions of everyday ex-perience (Unger 2007). In anthropological terms, the cultivated disposi-tions Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls the habitus may not merely conserve the objective social order. Bourdieu at times gives that impression, coming close to asserting the determinism of social structures (de Certeau 1984: 56–60). Yet even if bodily dispositions more or less perfectly replicate structures, might certain structures have pliability and transformability built into them? Such structures would inculcate not dispositions in spite of which a “margin of freedom” (Bourdieu 2000: 234–236) remains, but dispositions toward mobility, dispositions toward discontinuity. In this case, people would embrace an experimental stance toward the world,

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not against their conditioning but because of it. The consequent collapse of such antinomies as structure and agency, roots and routes, continuity and discontinuity could also reconcile the two Greek words that create what Pierre Hadot (1968: 497) identifi es as an internal opposition in the category of conversion. Suggested by the Makhuwa case is that a return to one’s origin (epistrophe) might in fact be a return to a state of rebirth (metanoia); that to convert to one’s true self is to convert to convertibility.

Next Moves

The lesson in all of this is that while scholars of Pentecostalism are right to point to discontinuity as a hallmark of Pentecostalism, it would be wrong to consider it uniquely so. The problem is not the foregrounding of radical renewal in and through Pentecostalism. It is the implication that there is something radically new about radical renewal. Pentecostal exceptional-ism is another expression of what I have called the occupational hazards that come with identifying oneself as an anthropologist of Christianity. Robbins worries that anthropology’s continuity bias, which necessarily excludes a “theory of truly radical cultural change,” perpetuates the eth-nocentric view of non-Western societies as stagnant. As a corrective, the anthropology of Christianity “recognizes that people really do learn new things and cultures really do change” (Robbins 2003: 231). This concern with novelty is commendable, existential even. But does the capacity to learn anything new require the presence of Pentecostalism or other as-pects of “modernity”? Are there not endogenous engagements with alter-ity that prefi gure (and inform) encounters with Christianity, such things as the experiences of migration, models of change, and rituals of transfor-mation discussed in this chapter?18 The notion that radical change initiates from such contemporary global forces as Pentecostalism may in fact be the ethnocentric position, as specious as journalists’ and politicians’ celebra-tions of Africa now being on the rise, now being on the move.19

Perhaps surprisingly, it is Pentecostal theologians who give the lie to Pen-tecostal exceptionalism. For Wolfgang Vondey (2010) and Nimi Wariboko (2012) in particular, Pentecostalism is but an expression of such existential universals as creativity, freedom, and play. Like Marshall (2009), Wariboko also draws extensively on Arendt’s notion of natality, the capacity to begin things anew. However, unlike most social scientists of Pentecostalism, Wari-boko refuses to confi ne natality to any single cultural or religious formation. This is in keeping with Arendt’s use of the term; she presents it, after all, in a book titled The Human Condition, a point seemingly lost to those who

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associate “born-again” experiences exclusively with “born-again” Chris-tians. Thus, although anthropologists of Christianity have valuably chal-lenged anthropology’s continuity bias and tendency toward culturalism, their assumption of Christian exceptionalism (see Hann 2007) with respect to discontinuity only recapitulates the problem. Despite recasting natality as “the pentecostal principle,” Wariboko much bett er captures the existen-tial point when he writes, “The pentecostal principle predates Pentecostal-ism and is likely to outlive it” (2012: 4).

I present my research as confi rmation of this crucial insight. At least in northern Mozambique, Pentecostalism does less to introduce natality than to reinforce a preexistent capacity for it. With its dances and trances, exorcisms and ecstasies, Pentecostalism restages without displacing the fundamental Makhuwa experience of the self as mobile and mutable. In other words, despite rhetorical claims to the contrary, Pentecostalism is more an extension of than alternative to indigenous ways of being. This conclusion is not a simplistic return to discredited models of hybridiza-tion, domestication, and continuity; for what gets continued in this case is precisely the disposition toward discontinuity.

Resulting from all this should be a measure of skepticism toward what is surely one of the dominant narratives in the academic study of religion today, that of Pentecostalism’s inexorable rise in Africa and elsewhere. The propensity for discontinuous change that contributes to the rise of Pentecostalism can also contribute to its decline. For just as the mobility of Makhuwa-speaking people draws them to the churches and fi nds rein-forcement in the churches, it also facilitates exit from the churches. People are predisposed to convert. But once they do so they feel litt le need to stop.

What implications does this have for the anthropological study of Christianity? The argument I want to advance is that we, as scholars, need to fi nd ways of being as polyontological in our thinking as the people we study are in their living. We need to cultivate a capacity to change direc-tions, engage in multiple worlds, and see borders as bridges rather than walls. In my own work, I am less inclined to identify as an anthropologist of Christianity, a narrow specialization, than as a friend of Abílio, a man on the move. So I close by catching up with him.

In my fi nal weeks of fi eldwork, with the sugar-apple trees just coming into bloom, the time came to lift Abílio’s reprimand. For the previous four months I saw him every week at church, but always seated silently in the back. This, again, was his punishment for propitiating the ancestors: no singing, no clapping, no preaching. In the AOGA church, the lifting of the reprimand is easily the most celebratory of occasions. It is called the ritual of liberation. That Sunday, for the fi rst time since he came out to issue

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the reprimand, Pastor Simões, the district pastor, returned to Kaveya vil-lage. After his sermon, he called Abílio to the front, placed his hand atop Abílio’s head, prayed his typically thunderous prayer, and declared the period of reprimand over. “You are liberated!” he yelled, and I joined the congregation in applause and ululations. Abílio smiled his broad smile and, as the voices of all gathered passed from cacophonic yells to euphoric songs, he grabbed the nearest drum. He pounded away for several min-utes, then set the drum aside and ran forward to join the dancers. The intensity and integrity of Abílio’s devotion were beyond dispute. Anyone there that day, hearing him praise God at full volume, watching him wor-ship with all his body, would be hard pressed to say there is anything superfi cial about his faith.

Afterward, I approached the church deacon to learn his thoughts on what had just transpired. We clasped each other’s hands and laughed heartily, still uplifted by the joyful mood.

“It looked like our brother was dead, and now he’s come back to life!” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the deacon replied, too animated to bother dissent-ing. Then, with the subtlest rephrasing, he corrected me: “He was bound, and now he’s free!”

It was an important clarifi cation. Undesired though death is, it is not resisted in northern Mozambique as intensely as it is in Western societies. Death—a passage rather than a cessation—actually conserves mobility, the fundamental property of the Makhuwa self. “From Namuli we come, to Namuli we return.” It is therefore not so much that Abílio was dead and now “born again” as he was bound and now free, seated and now dancing, immobile and now mobile. There is a certain irony to the fact that the district pastor came all the way from the capital to offi ciate at this celebration. For we can know one thing for sure: Abílio, now back on his feet, will move again. What threatens to leave pastors—and scholars—as confounded as they have ever been, is that there is no telling where his next move might take him.

Notes

I thank Michael Jackson and Albert Piett e for inviting my contribution to this volume, and Linda van de Kamp, Simon Coleman, and Don Seeman for off ering helpful com-ments. The fi eld research on which this chapter is based was fi nanced primarily by the

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Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and also by Harvard Univer-sity’s Weatherhead Center for International Aff airs and Committ ee on African Stud-ies. Logistical and intellectual support came from the Centro de Investigação Xirima in Niassa, Mozambique, particularly its director Father Giuseppe Frizzi, I.M.C., and also from the Centro de Estudos Africanos of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique.

1. “The Hopeful Continent” 2011; Perry 2012. 2. Pentecostalism is that branch of Christianity whose institutional origins trace back to

the early twentieth century and that emphasizes such bodily expressions of piety as speaking in tongues and miraculous healing (Anderson 2004). Ethnographic studies of Pentecostal and other forms of Christianity that engage existential-phenomenological thought are few but growing in number; these include Csordas 1994; Lester 2005; Mar-shall 2009; Bielo 2011; Luhrmann 2012; Csordas 2012; and Seeman 2014.

3. No less a sociologist than Peter Berger has remarked that, “In all likelihood, Pentecos-talism is the fastest-growing movement in history” (2012: 46), while prominent religion scholar Harvey Cox (2009: 197) has noted “the tsunami of Pentecostalism that is sweep-ing across the non-Western world.”

4. Underlying this bifurcation of distinct epochs is a Foucauldian historiography. Con-cerned that what he calls “continuous histories” lend themselves to teleologies and to-talities, Michel Foucault (1972) reconceives the history of science as a series of epistemic ruptures and discontinuities.

5. Ilana van Wyk (2014) has observed similar patt erns in the Universal Church of the King-dom of God elsewhere in southern Africa. She documents how church leaders’ active discouragement of bonds of intimacy permits participants to approach the church prag-matically, to move in and out of it with relative ease.

6. In an essay on Christianity in the Senegambia region, Robert Baum similarly points out the distorting eff ect of research decisions: the belief of “commentators” in the decline of traditional religions has been reinforced by a tendency to study African religions in areas where massive conversion has already taken place” (Baum 1990: 371).

7. This is a pseudonym. To protect anonymity, I have changed the names of most indi-viduals and locations.

8. The most recent census statistics, from 2007, place Niassa’s population density at 9.5 people per square kilometer.

9. The AOGA is of Zimbabwean origin, but soon after its founding spread across national borders, particularly into Mozambique (Maxwell 2006).

10. In a similar vein, Linda van de Kamp (2013) describes the upward mobility of certain women in urban Mozambique and their willingness to “travel” across cultural and re-ligious boundaries. Both forms of mobility, she argues, connect to the transnationalism of the Pentecostal churches these women are joining, and help explain those churches’ success.

11. It should not surprise that Matt hew Engelke’s critique of an overly exclusive focus on discontinuity in conversion studies emerges from his detailed portrait of a single man. I share his view that “the array of churches and movements” upon which scholars tend to focus has caused the study of African Christianity to “suff er from a lack of detailed accounts of everyday followers” (2004: 84).

12. Pamela Klassen expresses this critique in her review of James Bielo’s Emerging Evangeli-cals: Faith Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (2011). Challenging what I consider to be Bielo’s valuable incorporation of phenomenological insights into the anthropological study of American evangelicalism, Klassen writes, “Granting autonomy to the people one is studying makes sense, but too much of a theoretical commitment to individual agency could be read as an evangelical Protestant conviction in itself” (2013: 679). For

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reasons I will consider shortly, the limiting of individuality to Protestantism strikes me as fundamentally fl awed, an example of the type of culturalism that anthropology would be bett er off without.

13. Makhuwa speakers, the most populous of all of Mozambique’s indigenous-language communities, live throughout northern Mozambique’s provinces of Niassa, Cabo Del-gado, Nampula, and Zambezia. In the so-called Makhuwa belt of Niassa province, lin-guists have distinguished between many dialects of the Makhuwa language, including Xirima, Mett o, Lomwé, and Interior.

14. That conversion here is presented as an internal aff air may not be surprising given the authorship of this dictionary, as of many African-language dictionaries, by European missionaries and priests. Throughout northern Mozambique, Roman Catholic clergy have, often with admirable sensitivity, committ ed years if not decades of their lives to documenting linguistic and ethnographic data of the Makhuwa people.

15. In this respect, the Makhuwa of southern Niassa province may be contrasted with the Makonde of Cabo Delgado province, also in northern Mozambique. The Makonde, well known and respected for their military resistance to Portuguese colonialists, have re-peatedly challenged outside aggressors and reformers, framing those challenges in the idiom of countersorcery (West 2005).

16. As argued and amply illustrated in an infl uential volume on religious change (Stewart and Shaw 1994), anti-syncretism is as viable a mode of religious being as is syncretism.

17. Some scholars of contemporary Christianity have helpfully att ended to the ways in which conversion processes can run in reverse, deploying such terms as “deconver-sion” (Bielo 2011: 28–46), “temporary conversions” (Pelkmans 2009), “disaffi liation” (Gooren 2010), and “post-Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians” (Jacobsen 2011: 56). However, even here, the shift back is presented as defi nitive and extraordinary rather than situational, unexceptional, and likely to be reversed yet again.

18. Much more detailed explorations of how indigenous models of change inform Chris-tian conversion can be found in Horton 1971; Rutherford 2006; and Vilaça and Wright 2009.

19. It suggests that G. W. F. Hegel (1956: 99) may have been right when he asserted about Africa that, on its own, “it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or de-velopment to exhibit.”

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